[Congressional Record Volume 146, Number 125 (Tuesday, October 10, 2000)]
[House]
[Pages H9513-H9514]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                     EPA HINDERING SMALL COMPANIES

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 19, 1999, the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Ballenger) is 
recognized during morning hour debates for 5 minutes.
  Mr. BALLENGER. Madam Speaker, first let me give you a quick history 
of my company. I founded a company in Hickory North Carolina, in 1957 
with a loan on my house. This company prints and converts polyethylene, 
polypropylene and cellophane for packaging for companies like Procter & 
Gamble and Johnson and Johnson for overwrap for cookies, baby diapers, 
the packages themselves. That is what the company does. It started off 
in 1957. At the present time we have 250 employees.
  What I want to do is gripe. I would like to gripe about our 
government.
  Several years ago, air pollution regulations went into effect. There 
was a whole list of various and sundry things that were polluting the 
air and doing horrible things to everybody's breathing and so forth. 
But at that time, my company, you have to print something on 
polyethylene that will evaporate and leave the ink there, so we were 
printing with methyl alcohol as a solvent and nylon as the coloring. 
You print the film, blow hot air at it, and evaporate the solvent. 
Well, what happened is the methyl alcohol at that time was going out 
the roof.
  Along comes an outfit called EPA, and EPA, with this long list of 
pollutants, decided that methyl alcohol, this is 5 or 6 years after the 
whole thing started, 5 or 6 years later they decided that methyl 
alcohol was a positive solvent.
  Well, I had seven printing presses in this plant of mine, and at that 
time we asked EPA, since they said we were polluting, what should we 
do? And they said, well, you have got to collect the solvent, the 
evaporating solvent, and destroy it. So we asked, could you give us 
some advice as to what to do? They said, well, we do not give advice, 
that is against the rules of the Federal government, but you have to do 
it.
  Well, this thing right here that you see on my left is what is called 
a catalytic converter. What it does is it collects the printing inks 
above all the printing presses, all seven of them, and vents it through 
this unit right here. In the bottom here we have an oven that is heated 
by natural gas, and it costs, by the way, $50,000 a year in natural gas 
to run this. At the top comes out what is left over.
  Well, $50,000 a year to operate and $600,000 a year to build it, and 
we were all set to go. We thought we were operating according to what 
the government wanted, and everything was fine, until a couple of years 
later they come back and they say, well, we have got a slight problem 
with your operation. There is pollution leaking out of your presses all 
through the building and so forth, so you have got to do something to 
stop that.
  Well, again, they did not give us any information as to what we were 
going to do, so what we did is we built a wall all the way around this 
building and made it a separate room, and in this separate room we put 
forced air. The way we used the forced air was air conditioning. This 
is $500,000 worth of air conditioning that we installed, and that costs 
$50,000 a year to operate. What it did is it forced all the air to go 
through the system and go to the catalytic converter.
  Well, this is great and wonderful. We have got the catalytic 
converter going, and the good old government comes up to us and says, I 
hate to say this to you, but you know those seven printing presses you 
have? Your catalytic converter is not big enough, it will only handle 
six printing presses. So they said, you have to shut down one of these 
printing presses. One of these printing presses costs about $800,000. 
So we had to shut down a $800,000 printing press at the request of our 
Federal Government to be able to handle this situation.
  This all sounds like we were doing what I would consider the right 
thing as far as the ecology of the country is concerned, as far as what 
is expected of business people in this country, although in certain 
areas of the world I am quite sure this does not happen.
  But what really bothered me was eventually I found out that a 
competitor of mine who had, roughly speaking, the same size plant that 
I had, went to EPA and discussed it with them, and they came up with a 
new conclusion. Their conclusion was to allow him to spend $50,000 a 
year penalty for the right to pollute.
  Now, here is a man that I am competing with. I have spent over $1 
million, that costs $60,000 a year, that costs $50,000 a year, I am 
spending $110,000 a year to take care of pollution, and he is paying 
$50,000 to do it on his own. This is what I consider the great and 
wonderful way that our Federal Government operates.
  So with that kind of information I called up EPA and I said, what is 
going on here? This does not make a whole bunch of sense to me. And 
they said, well you have to realize we have inspectors all over the 
country, and everything is left up to the individual decision by each 
inspector. So the inspector came up with this brilliant idea

[[Page H9514]]

that I had to spend $1 million plus $100,000 a year in expenses, and my 
competitor only had to spend $50,000 a year.
  I heard talk earlier about the difficulty of competing with China and 
imports. Well, I compete with on a regular basis with Taiwan, Korea and 
Mexico, and I would be willing to bet that none of these countries have 
even the slightest idea about trying to stop pollution. Yet in our 
country we have forced people to spend that kind of money.
  I do wish the government would stop and think of what they are doing. 
They do not know what they are doing, and they ought to forget it.

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